Modelling the response of Antarctic marine species to environmental changes. Methods, applications and limitations

Ecological modelling is nowadays widely used to highlight the environmental conditions that influence the species ecological niche and better understand their response to environmental changes. Methodological challenges are however present for Southern Ocean marine case studies and it is important to evaluate the performance and limits of such models. In this PhD thesis, several examples allow studying physiological models that simulate the influence of the environment on individual metabolism ; distribution models that study the relationship between species presence records and the environment ; and dispersal models that predict the drift of propagules in water masses.
From these analyses, an ensemble of methodological guidelines were provided, to complement R scripts and tutorials that allow to correct for the different biases and improve modelling performance. Modelling marine Southern Ocean case studies is possible, but requires numerous cautions and further data to improve model evaluation procedures.